“They’re squatters.”
Tomás sat at my kitchen island sipping a beer. He and Elena had made a visit to the Rodriguez family across the street.
“He’s legal, his wife and son ain’t,” Tomás continued. “Been on hard times. Found the house here and moved in, keepin’ things on the down-low. Rodriguez does pick-up construction work. I think he’s mad you gave this Jimmy Radmon kid work he could use.”
“Makes sense,” I said. Tomás would drink beer if nothing else was around. Lucky for him I had a fifth of Jose Cuervo Silver cooling its heels in my refrigerator. I poured him a chilled shot. “I’d be mad at me, too.”
“He jimmied the electrical,” Tomás said. He sipped the shot and nodded approvingly before knocking it back old-school. “Heating’s another thing. Cold as hell in there. Not good for anybody, especially the boy. Elena lives for shit like this. They’re her mission now.”
“And you?”
Tomás laughed. “I’ll do what I can when I can. But don’t no man want another man trying to show him how to be a man.”
I nodded.
Tomás asked how this thing with Eleanor Paget was going and I told him I honestly didn’t know. I said I’d had visitors. “Sounds like you could use some backup, compadre,” Tomás said.
“Maybe,” I said. “If you’re up for it.”
Tomás grinned. “Got nothin’ else to do.”
My next stop was Beaumont Hospital in Grosse Pointe.
The emotionally exhausted, sunken Aaron Spiegelman I’d seen on the local TV news a week ago was even more depleted as he sat by his wife’s hospital bed.
Mariana Spiegelman lay in the quiet repose of one floating weightless inside a coma. The top of her head was wrapped in gauze and her oxygen came from a clear plastic tube curling from her cheeks to her nostrils. There were monitors near her bed that provided a cold calculation of how alive she was.
Although the room resembled any other hospital room, there were touches that made Mariana Spiegelman’s clinical surroundings softer, less sterile: Floor-length white lace curtains over the rectangle of window. A dark wood side table with a vase bearing yellow and orange mums. A Turkish rug, two bentwood rockers and an antique brass Stiffel floor lamp. Someone had done her hair and had applied a tasteful touch of makeup to her face.
Spiegelman sat in one of the rockers wearing a wrinkled pair of khakis, worn Sperry Dockside shoes and a blue Lacoste tennis shirt. He’d been casually rocking back and forth and reading John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress to his wife: “‘The law, instead of cleansing the heart from sin, doth revive it, put strength into, and increase it in the soul . . .’”
I brought flowers and a book: Pablo Neruda’s The Captain’s Verses: Love Poems. Spiegelman saw me and stopped reading. His eyes filled with tears. Quickly he wiped them away and in a low, hoarse voice, said, “Why are you here?”
I walked tentatively into Mariana Spiegelman’s room. “I heard what happened. Whatever our history, Mr. Spiegelman, I can’t tell you how sorry I am about your wife.”
He stared at me through wet, red eyes before nodding to a small table in the corner of the room. “You can put the flowers there. Someone will put them in a vase.”
I handed him the book, and he suggested we leave his wife’s room and go for coffee in the hospital’s cafeteria.
We sat at a table in the cafeteria for a long time without a word between us. Spiegelman looked even worse in the sterile, white light of the cafeteria. He’d been a wiry man, but now he looked gaunt, nearly skeletal. His normally clean-shaven face bore grey stubble. Occasionally he blew away the steam rising from his coffee, but he didn’t drink. Just as well. Hospital coffee is often in need of serious nursing.
Just when I was convinced Spiegelman had slipped into his own coma, he looked up at me and said in a thin voice, “Whatever you want to hear from me, you won’t. You should leave.”
Said like a man who wanted nothing more than to lay bare all secrets and sins on any altar that would have them.
“You don’t have to say anything, Mr. Spiegelman,” I said. “I just wanted you to know how sorry I am about your wife’s accident.”
His eye twitched and his lips pursed. The word “accident” settled on his brain like the needles of a thistle.
“Read her some of the poetry,” I said, taking a sip of the brown coffee-water. “My father loved reading Neruda to my mother and she loved the way his voice sounded on the words.”
Spiegelman nodded.
We sat in silence for a while longer. I thought about leaving, but something told me he needed someone sitting across from him. Someone who, even in silence, could hold the tether and keep him from floating any further into despair. Finally, staring at his coffee, he said, “Do you think it’s possible to be in love with two women at the same time, Mr. Snow?”
“Yes.”
He nodded, then after a tentative sip of coffee, said, “I loved Eleanor. Very much. I know what people said about her. What she did. How she treated people. But still . . .”
I reached across the table and put a hand on his shoulder. Tears fell from his eyes and splashed on the table. He hunched under the weight of his painful silence. I stood to leave him alone with his grief. I stopped when he said, “I don’t know what to do.” He drew in a ragged breath then continued. “She—Mariana—she always straightens my tie in the morning. Sometimes she’ll laugh and say, ‘When will you ever learn to tie a tie?’ Then she’ll kiss me like I’m—the only one.” He looked up at me, his eyes wet. “They’ll come for you, Mr. Snow. Eleanor was just the beginning. I—I didn’t want to believe her. It wasn’t supposed to be this hard. They—they’ve never had it this hard.”
“Detroit’s a hard city,” I said. In all likelihood “they” meant Brewster and the ex-military security detail nested at the bank.
“I said no the first time,” Spiegelman said, staring at his cup of coffee. “A briefcase full of cash. All I had to do was walk away from thirty years of building a business. Threw them out of my house. The second time, same offer, less money in the briefcase. Atchison came with them. I said no. This is the third time. No money and—my wife—here.” He paused, then sucked in another breath. “If I’d only—”
“None of this is your fault, Mr. Spiegelman,” I said. “The people who hurt your wife—the ones who killed Eleanor Paget—they’re going to pay.”
Spiegelman gave a laugh that was somewhere between abject defeat and utter absurdity. “What can you do about any of this? These people?”
For a moment dark and bloody thoughts brewed in my mind, the pit of my stomach. Then, an unexpected flutter of light: from somewhere in the cafeteria, the sound of children laughing. I turned and looked: two kids and a woman I assumed to be their mother sat at a table playing a child’s card game. As I looked at them, happy in a place I suspected rarely saw happiness, I said almost absentmindedly, “When I was a kid I was pretty lucky at a game called La Pirinola. Four or five kids—cousins, neighborhood kids—each brings a bag of nuts or some chocolate, loose change, maybe comic books. One player at a time spins the pirinola, which is like a dreidel. When it stops spinning a face-up side tells you pon, or take: take one, take two, take zero or toma todo—take it all—from the other kids.” I returned my attention to Spiegelman. “I’m gonna take it all from these bastards.”
Spiegelman slowly nodded as he looked down at his coffee. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“Those men. All they were supposed to do was—warn you. Make you leave Eleanor alone. Leave her memory alone.”
The men who had come to Tomás’s house.
“One of the security guards at the bank said he knew some people,” Spiegelman said. “I told him just a warning. Gave him money. Nothing else was supposed to happen. Nobody else was supposed to get hurt.”
“Which security guard?”
“Max,” Spiegelman said. “No. Dax. Dax Randolph. Brown hair. Grey at the temples. Wire-rim glasses.”
I stood and said, “Read your wife some poetry tonight.”
Absentmindedly, he nodded.
I left, not knowing what to do or how to feel about Spiegelman. His love for Eleanor Paget inadvertently put me—put Tomás, his wife and their five-year-old granddaughter—in Titan’s cross hairs.
On the drive downtown I got a call from Frank.
“Dude!” Frank said. “A Cadillac ATS-V? You rock!”
Frank was about forty-five minutes into his four-hour, 260-mile drive along I-75 North to Traverse City. Apparently he was enjoying the car I’d reserved for him.
I asked Frank if he had everything—and by everything I meant guns and ammo. Frank ticked off the short list: A Baretta M9, a Ruger LC9 and a Springfield M1A rifle. He had licenses and ammo for all except the Springfield rifle, which had been his father’s and was of more sentimental value than anything else.
“Sentimental value’s no value at all right now, Frank,” I said. “Anything else that puts us in the winner’s circle?”
“Couple good jokes and movie-star looks?”
Frank had called ahead and spoken to Colleen. She’d walked the perimeter of the house, taken some notes and made a hardware store list of supplies needed to beef up security. She’d also walked basement to attic, front door to back. Vivian had asked what she was doing. Colleen had told her the Farmers’ Almanac had predicted a Midwest winter full of heavy snows and subzero temperatures. She was simply putting things together to winterize the house.
Colleen had also spun a story about her cousin Frankie, who’d just gotten out of the army and needed a place to stay for a while. Vivian was excited by the prospect of meeting another of Colleen’s family members. I asked Frank his first impressions of Colleen.
“Oh, yeah, dude,” Frank said, “No doubt she can handle herself. Tough as hell. Smart, too. Plus she’s a country girl. Bein’ a son of Big Sky country I’m partial to country girls. My daddy used to say a country girl’s got about as much gold in their heart as they got dirt under their fingernails.”
As I drove, I thought about Frank’s dad, and then about my dad—about the things our dads had taught us that turned us into military men. While my mother took pleasure in reading poetry to me when I was a child, my father would read me the battlefield psychology and philosophy of Sun Tzu, Thucydides and Carl von Clausewitz.
“What possible reason could there be for a boy—a child!—to know about war?” my mother once said.
“I’m not raisin’ a boy,” my father replied. “I’m raising a man. And maybe you ain’t noticed, baby, but this is a world of men chewin’ up boys for sport.”
I thought now of Sun Tzu as I drove. Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment—that which they cannot anticipate.
At Titan Securities Investments Group, I was greeted by the attractive black woman at the reception desk.
“Welcome back, Mr. Snow.”
“I need to see Kip Atchison,” I said. “Now.”
The three well-dressed security guards who manned the lobby had, not unlike before, taken an acute interest in me. A young guy casually flanked me while the older athletically-built guy named Dax stood fifty feet behind me to the right. Two more guards—a massive black guy with no neck and a slab-of-gristle-beef white guy—stood resolutely by the elevators.
The receptionist nervously searched my eyes for a moment, then quickly dialed four numbers and touched her ear.
“Yes,” she said. “This is reception. I have Mr. Snow here. He wishes a few minutes with Mr. Atchison.” There was a long pause. A few nods. A couple of furtive glances at me. Then, “Yes, thank you. I’ll pass that on.”
Of course, I knew what she was going to say but I waited around to hear it anyway: “I’m sorry, but Mr. Atchison is unavailable. If you’d like to make an appointment—”
“You don’t mind if I just go up, do you?” I said, moving quickly from the reception desk toward the elevators.
The brown-haired guard with wire rim glasses quickly made his way in front of me and blocked my path. “Mr. Snow,” he said. “ My name is Dax Randolph. I think we should—”
“You think we should what, Dax?” I said. “Dance? Friend each other on Facebook? Share tapas?”
“To begin with,” he said, with a forced smile and dead blue eyes, “I think we should calm down and—”
Instead of listening to Dax’s advice, I juked right and moved left around him, continuing my hurried walk toward the elevators.
The slab-of-beef white guard by the elevators took a step toward me.
“I got him, sir,” the guard said, moving toward me. Before Dax could say anything, the guard took a swing at me. With overdeveloped muscles like his, speed and flexibility were severely compromised. Two jabs to his solar plexus, a right-cross to his jaw and a heel to the knee and he was down.
I cut a look of combat readiness to the massive black guy.
“Lousy pay, empty promises, now yo ass squarin’ off on me?” the big black security guard said. He held up the palms of his hands and shook his head. “Oh, hell no. Don’t need this shit. I’m out.” He yanked off his black clip-on tie, dropped it to the marble floor and walked past me out of the building.
I felt Dax put a hand on my shoulder. I grabbed his hand, locked the thumb back and turned, bringing his arm up and behind his back. I brought my knee up into Dax’s kidney twice.
The receptionist gasped and said, “Oh, God!”
Dax wasn’t done. “This isn’t a smart thing to do, Mr. Snow,” he said as I pushed him away. He shook off whatever pain I might have caused and assumed a stance that was somewhere between well-trained karate and nasty Krav Maga.
I deflected his first two quick punches with right and left forearms, absorbing the impact of his knee into the side of my right thigh. I countered with a heel to his left knee and a right hook to his jaw. Both attacks had impact, but not enough to put him down.
“This is going to end badly for you, Mr. Snow,” Dax said, recovering quickly.
“Maybe,” I said. “Let’s give it a go.”
The white security guard I’d laid out managed to get to his feet, but Dax held up a hand. “I got this.”
I grinned. “Oh, you got this, huh?”
All warfare is based on deception.
Dax smiled at me. “Yessir. I do.”
Bank customers who entered the lobby were hustled into a corner by two of the other security guards.
“I would suggest you walk out of here under your own power, Mr. Snow,” Dax said, holding his stance, “or get carried out on a stretcher.”
“I’d tell you to kiss my ass,” I said, “but I don’t want you getting that close to me.”
“If necessary I will shoot you,” Dax said calmly as he circled to my right.
“Not before I break the barrel of your gun off in your ass,” I said.
Dax unleashed a flurry of kicks and punches. Some connected with my ribs and chest. I managed to deflect a few, but he was good. Better than I’d been in my prime marine days. And I’d been damned good.
I managed to land a kick to his ribs that would have brought down an average man. Dax was no average man. He took the kick and countered with his own swing kick, which connected hard with my right shoulder and threw me against a marble wall. He didn’t waste time, moving in close and landing three high-speed punches to my stomach and one to my face, which he followed by an elbow to my right cheek. I went down on one knee. Dax dropped to a knee behind me, locked my neck in a chokehold and waited for my lights to go out.
“Get the elevator,” Dax called out to the big white security guard.
“Let him go.”
Ray Danbury.
Dax let me go. He stood, calmly adjusted his tie and smiled. I stayed on my knees for a few seconds, hoping not to pass out, throw up or both.
August Snow: Tough Guy.
“Officer,” Dax said, “this man—”
“Quiet,” Danbury said. Standing to Danbury’s right was Leo Cowling, resplendent in a navy blue wool car coat and matching fedora. He was grinning ear to ear as he looked down at me. On Danbury’s left were two young uniformed cops. I recognized one: Aswan, the young Chaldean fresh out of the academy.
“We’ll be filing a complaint,” Dax ventured.
Danbury knelt down by me and whispered, “You okay?”
“Lucky for him you got here when you did,” I said, catching my breath. The stars popping in front of my eyes dissipated. “I was wiping the floor with this jerk-off.”
“Funny,” Danbury said. “Looked to me like he was using your face as a mop.”
Cowling was smiling as Danbury helped me to my feet.
Then Danbury handcuffed me, handed me over to the two young patrolmen and quietly said to Aswan, “Take him to my car.”
The patrolmen nodded and, hands firmly locked on my upper arms, led me outside to Danbury’s car. As they were marching me through the lobby, I called out in a voice loud enough for the bank’s patrons to hear, “Why won’t they give me my money? It’s my money! Twelve million! What have they done with my money? What are they doing with everybody’s money?”
From behind me I heard Cowling shout, “Read him his rights and shut him the fuck up!”
Outside, a small group of noonday onlookers gawked at the proceedings. A few—the ones who weren’t homeless—took video on their phones; maybe something other people could “Like” on Facebook, Snapchat or YouTube. I noticed a trash can and said to Patrolman Aswan, “You mind?”
I leaned my head into the trash can and vomited.
Vomiting in public is bad enough. Vomiting with your hands cuffed behind your back is enough to dislocate shoulders. Fortunately for me, I had strong shoulders.
Once I’d completed my business, I stood upright. Aswan asked if I wanted a breath mint. He opened a tin and tossed two curiously strong mints into my mouth like a trainer tossing fresh herring into the mouth of a seal.
“‘When you are the anvil, be patient—’” I said, chewing the mints.
“‘—And when you are the hammer, strike hard,’” Aswan finished, then repeated the proverb in its original Arabic.
I winked at him with my good eye, then got in Danbury’s car.
Danbury didn’t say a word as Cowling drove us back to the 14th Precinct. Cowling kept looking back at me in the rearview mirror. If it were up to him, he would have driven me down to the river, given me a double tap to the back of the head, then gone to lunch at The Whitney.
When we arrived at the 14th, Cowling pushed me toward a female officer and told her to throw me in lockup.
I was in lockup for more than an hour. I figured Danbury needed to cool out before he saw my face again. In the meantime I made new friends.
“Muhfuckin’ five-oh, man,” a black man wearing motorcycle club riding leathers grumbled. He had an Afro-mohawk and a variety of ear, nose and lip rings. “Niggah can’t catch a break in this goddamn town.”
“I feel ya, bro,” I said. My right eye was puffing up and closing. My ribs ached and I hadn’t quite gotten my legs back.
The large black biker furrowed his bushy eyebrows, glared at me with bloodshot eyes and said, “Wha’d the po-po jack yo ass fo?”
I gave him a hard look and made sure he saw my swollen jaw and slowly closing right eye.
“Killing a librarian,” I said. “With kindness.”